The PTR for patch 9.1 went up recently and we can now start taking a look at the changes. In this post I’ll focus on the profession changes.
Few changes and additions
Overall there are not that many changes to professions. There’s no new materials, and just a handful of new recipes. All this is is of course based on the current build with further builds likely to flesh it out. There’s definitely a lot of placeholder values, so all the information in this post is obviously subject to change.
New recipes
In the current PTR build there are four new craftable items, and they are all optional reagents. We get two new types of Crafter’s marks to upgrade the item level of crafted armor, as well as a new optional reagent for upgrading base legendaries, the Vestige of Origin.
Crafter’s marks
Crafter’s mark 3 will upgrade an item to item level 180 currently. I assume it will function exactly as Crafter’s mark 2 does currently and help provide an initial ilvl boost. In addition to this the Prestigious Crafter’s Mark is a new epic quality crafter’s mark that will upgrade an item to item level 200. It has the drawback however of turning it Unique Equipped Shadowlands crafted. So you can only equip one item level 200 crafted piece.
Since max level gear will increase by about 30 ilvls, it’s a little sad that initial gearing crafted gear only gets boosted by 12. Why we can’t just craft item level 200 gear freely in the next patch is beyond me, but it is what it is. Ultimately the crafter’s mark 3 gear will fill the same niche as mark 2 gear does now of providing a fast initial ilvl boost for fresh alts. The item level 200 versions will likely only sell well for the most heavily statted slots (chest, legs and helmet), as they are unique-equipped. If we get lucky maybe we can use these on weapons.
The crafting costs are currently placeholder values, so it is hard to say how much more expensive this will make the items.
Vestige of Origin
The Vestige of Origin is looking like the way Blizzard wants to handle further item level upgrades to legendaries. On PTR you can apply optional reagents to any rank base legendary. My personal guess is that this will give a 30 item level boost or something similar and we will then have effectively 4 new ranks of base legendaries. Maybe there’s a new currency as well to upgrade them. You can’t craft Vestiges yet, so no one really knows how it will work yet, we will just have to see. At the moment everyone is just speculating wildly, whether we get 4 new ranks or the vestige by itself is enough for a just a single new rank remains to be seen.
The Vestiges are BoP and they are clearly meant to make higher ilvl base legendaries that you presumably can then sell to other players, similar to how it works with crafters mark gear. This does mean that certain combinations of professions are likely to be better than others. For the current placeholder costs JC seems the most expensive one, but I have not mathed it out.
Progenian Fragments
The vestiges require materials already in the game to craft them. In addition there is a new Progenian Fragment needed. Right now we don’t know the source for this item, but it is not BoP. I have seen a screenshot of one being rewarded for the new daily quests in Korthia, so you may get some there. I assume we will know this when the next build is released and we can actually progress far enough in the new content.
It’s early days
It’s still early days in the PTR cycle, so it will be interesting to see what we actually get when they have it ready, I’ll be following news closely, so stay tuned!